Half of my gene pool belongs to some barbarians who brutally raped my grand-grand-grand-grand European mother. This is a troubling issue for me, because the half of me yearns to apologize to my other half, but I am not sure which half is which.

I am in trouble.

Furthermore, and please don’t share this secret with anyone, given a choice I’d rather be an aggressor than a victim. Shame on me. I learned this lesson on the National Geographic Channel. It is a serious moral dilemma for me.

Good thing, 99% of mankind is in the same predicament. If they only look hard into their history, people will find someone to whom they need to apologize, or convesely, someone who victimized their ancestors and needs to appologize to them.

I think that every human being should just apologize to the world for something, and things will take care of themselves. Let’s get it over with. What a peachy way to make one feel morally superior and move on with life (or get a life).

But it is an interesting question to consider, whether we need to apologize for the actions of our ancestors that occured hundreds of years ago. The part of me that would say yes, would be purely in the interest of pursuing peace with all humanity, and acknowledging that we recognize slavery or racial genocide as being wrong. I think when we do that, we also back it up by moving through our own lives with actions that communicate our new understanding of respect and equality for all.

But the flip side is as you discovered, that there are times our ancestors may have actually been going against the tide of the culture and didn’t participate, thus having nothing to confess.

I know that in my family, we can trace back to the Jamestown Colony, and he became a captain in the Revolutionary War, in the battle of Yorktown when Cornwalis surrendered to Washington. But some of his descendents lived in the South and had slaves. Do I need to apologize for that? I am not sure. Even though I disagree with it and would never own a slave.I do lead my life in such a way as to be just in race relations. Is that not an apology in itself?